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Beetlejuice is a 1988 American Gothic film dark fantasy comedy horror film directed by Tim Burton from a screenplay by Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren based on a story by McDowell and Larry Wilson. The film stars Michael Keaton as Betelgeuse, along with Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, Jeffrey Jones, Catherine O'Hara and Winona Ryder in supporting roles.
The plot revolves around a recently deceased couple. As , they are not allowed to leave their house. They contact Betelgeuse, a sleazy "-exorcist", to scare the house's new inhabitants away. The film prominently features music from Harry Belafonte's albums Calypso and Jump Up Calypso.
Beetlejuice was released in the United States on March 30, 1988, by Warner Bros. The film was a critical and commercial success, grossing $84 million against a $15M budget. It won the Academy Award for Best Makeup and three Saturn Awards: Best Horror Film, Best Makeup, and Best Supporting Actress for Sylvia Sidney. The film's success spawned a media franchise, consisting of an animated television series, video games, a 2018 stage musical, and a sequel entitled Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which was released in 2024, with a third film in development.
The house is sold to New York real estate developer Charles Deetz and his second wife Delia, a talentless sculptor. Charles' teenage Goth subculture daughter, Lydia, lives with them. Under the guidance of Otho Fenlock, Delia begins renovating the house with a new-wave aesthetic of postmodern art.
While consulting the Handbook on how to eject the Deetzes, the Maitlands see an advertisement for 'Betelgeuse'. Following the handbook's guidelines, they travel to an otherworldly waiting room filled with other distressed souls. After navigating the afterlife's complex bureaucracy, the Maitlands return home only to realize three months have passed and the house has been completely redesigned. Their caseworker Juno arrives and discloses the Maitlands must remain in their house for 125 years before "moving on", while discouraging them from contacting Betelgeuse, her former assistant-turned-freelance "bio-exorcist", to drive out the Deetzes. Betelgeuse can only be summoned by uttering his name three times. Juno recommends that the Maitlands haunt the Deetzes themselves.
Adam and Barbara are invisible to Charles and Delia, which thwarts their fright attempts. Lydia, however, can see them, which she attributes to her peculiar nature. The Maitlands invoke Betelgeuse and are transported into the model. Betelgeuse's crude and morbid demeanor is offensive and they exit the model. The Maitlands possess Charles, Delia and their wealthy friends during a dinner party. Unexpectedly, their antics only amuse the group, inspiring Charles to pitch a supernatural theme park to investor Maxie Dean. The Deetzes uncover the town model in the attic, where Otho finds the Handbook. Betelgeuse transforms into a giant snake and terrorizes the Deetzes before Barbara banishes him back to the model.
Juno calls Barbara and Adam back to the afterlife office and berates them for releasing Betelgeuse. Meanwhile, Lydia, depressed and blaming the Maitlands for Betelgeuse's attack, discovers Betelgeuse inside the model. She almost summons him in exchange for passage to the afterlife, but the Maitlands return and stop her.
Maxie Dean arrives and demands evidence of paranormal occurrences, but the Maitlands refuse to manifest again. Otho uses the Handbook and conducts what he believes is a séance. He summons Adam and Barbara by using their wedding clothes, but they begin aging and decaying rapidly as Otho has mistakenly mixed the summoning Incantation with an exorcism; leaving them in a state of perpetual suffering.
A horrified Lydia invokes Betelgeuse, who will help if she marries him so he can remain in the mortal world. He saves the Maitlands, drives away Otho and the Deans, then prepares to wed Lydia. The Maitlands attempt to banish Betelgeuse, who teleports Adam to the town model and Barbara to the desert-land. Barbara rides back into the house on a sandworm, which devours Betelgeuse.
The Deetzes and the Maitlands agree to harmoniously live together, and the Maitlands are close to Lydia. Betelgeuse is seen sitting in the afterlife waiting room, waiting his turn to see a caseworker. When he attempts to steal a witch doctor ghost's numbered ticket, his head gets shrunk.
Michael McDowell and Larry Wilson formed a partnership (Pecos Productions) with entertainment attorney Michael Bender, and Beetlejuice was their first original project. After developing the story, McDowell and Wilson decided they would write the first draft of the screenplay together, while Wilson would only take 'Story By' credit, as well as his 'Producer' credit.
Burton had gotten to know and worked with McDowell and Wilson (who co-wrote the script for "The Jar", an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents that Burton directed). Burton read their first draft of Beetlejuice, liked it but had other projects that kept him from becoming involved at that time.
The original script is far less comedic and much darker; the Maitlands' car crash is depicted graphically, with Barbara's arm crushed and the couple screaming for help as they slowly drown. A reference to this remains: Barbara remarks that her arm feels frozen upon returning home as a ghost.Burton, Tim (1988). Beetlejuice. Warner Bros. Studios. Instead of possessing the Deetzes and forcing them to dance during dinner, the Maitlands cause a vine-patterned carpet to come to life and attack them by lashing them to their chairs.
The character of Betelgeuse—envisioned in the first draft as a winged demon who takes on the form of a short man—is also intent on killing the Deetzes rather than scaring them and wants sex from Lydia instead of marriage. In this version of the script, Betelgeuse need only be exhumed from his grave to be summoned, after which he is free to wreak havoc; he can be summoned, but not controlled, by saying his name three times and wanders the world freely, tormenting different characters in different manifestations.
In another version of the script, the film concludes with the Maitlands, Deetzes, and Otho conducting an exorcism ritual that destroys Betelgeuse, and the Maitlands transforming into miniature versions of themselves and moving into Adam's model of their home, which they refurbish to look like their house before the Deetzes moved in.
Co-author and producer Larry Wilson has talked about the reaction to the first draft by a prominent executive at Universal, where Wilson was employed at the time:
Skaaren's rewrite shifted the film's tone, eliminating the graphic nature of the Maitlands' deaths and further developing the concept created by McDowell and Wilson that the Afterlife is a complex bureaucracy. Skaaren's rewrite also added to McDowell and Wilson's depiction of the limbo that keeps Barbara and Adam trapped inside their home; in the original script, it takes the form of a massive void filled with giant clock gears that shred the fabric of time and space as they move. Skaaren had Barbara and Adam encounter different limbos every time they leave their home, including the "clock world" and the sandworm world, identified as Saturn's moon Titan. Skaaren also introduced the leitmotif of music accompanying Barbara and Adam's ghostly hijinks, although his script specified R&B tunes instead of Harry Belafonte and was to have concluded with Lydia dancing to "When a Man Loves a Woman".
Skaaren's first draft retained some of McDowell's Betelgeuse's more sinister characteristics but toned the character down to make him a troublesome pervert rather than blatantly murderous. Betelgeuse's true form was that of the Middle Eastern man, and much of his dialogue was written in African-American Vernacular English. This version concluded with the Deetzes returning to New York and leaving Lydia in the care of the Maitlands, who, with Lydia's help, transform their home's exterior into a stereotypical haunted house while returning the interior to its previous state. It also featured deleted scenes such as the real estate agent, Jane, trying to convince the Deetzes to allow her to sell the house for them (having sold it to them in the first place—Charles and Delia decline) and a revelation of how Betelgeuse had died centuries earlier (he attempted to hang himself while drunk—having been rejected by a woman—only to mess it up and die slowly by choking to death rather than quickly by snapping his neck) and wound up working for Juno before striking out on his own as a "freelance bio-exorcist".
Retrospectively, McDowell was impressed with how many people made the connection between the film's title and the star Betelgeuse.
The complete score (with the Belafonte tracks included) was released in both the DVD and the Blu-ray as an isolated music track in the audio settings menu; this version of the audio track consists entirely of "clean" musical cues, uninterrupted by dialogue or sound effects.
Pauline Kael called the film a "comedy classic". Jonathan Rosenbaum called it a "creative mess" in a positive review in the Chicago Reader. Desson Howe of The Washington Post felt Beetlejuice had the "perfect" balance of bizarreness, comedy and horror.
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times gave the film two out of four stars, writing that he "would have been more interested if the screenplay had preserved their Alec sweet romanticism and cut back on the slapstick". Ebert called Keaton "unrecognizable behind pounds of makeup" and said "his scenes don't seem to fit with the other action". On At the Movies, Ebert's colleague, Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune, said he could not fault the film's art direction or ambition, but called it "too much of a not very good thing" and said he was annoyed by the overbearing antics of Beetlejuice in the second half of the film. He and Ebert both compared Beetlejuice unfavorably to Ghostbusters and gave the film a "thumbs down." Janet Maslin of The New York Times also gave the film a negative review, writing that the film "tries anything and everything for effect, and only occasionally manages something marginally funny" and "is about as funny as a shrunken head".
In his book Comedy-Horror Films: A Chronological History, 1914–2008, Bruce G. Hallenbeck praised the film's lively script, assured direction, offbeat casting, and "delightfully off-kilter, Edward Gorey-like look", citing the explorer with the shrunken head and the animated sandworm as particularly memorable visuals.
Beetlejuice won Best Horror Film and Best Make-up at the 1988 Saturn Awards. Sidney also won the Saturn for Best Supporting Actress, and the film received five other nominations: Direction for Burton, Writing for McDowell and Skaaren, Best Supporting Actor for Keaton, Music for Elfman, and Special Effects. Beetlejuice was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. Beetlejuice was 88th in the American Film Institute's list of Best Comedies.
In April 2025, a third film was confirmed to be in development.
A series of juvenile novels based on the animated television series were published by Aladdin Paperbacks in 1992. The novels were Beetlejuice for President, Lydia's Scream Date, Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare, Twisted Tours, Camp Fright, and Trial by Ghost.
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Official site for Beetlejuice's Rock and Roll Graveyard Revue
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